Days
by paper-rose16
Summary: “You can’t keep thinking in ‘what ifs’, Michael. Life is what it is, and we can’t change it. Don’t allow yourself to travel down this road and only wonder how things might be different.” -The one month between S3 and S4.


**Days**

His first night out of Sona without her, he doesn't sleep.

Instead, he's curled up on the seat of the car he'd taken from an old lot earlier that day, pinched into the tiniest ball he can manage, trying to hold on.

And even though he's not dreaming, he may as well be. Because he can still see her as a picture-perfect image in his mind – her hair, her eyes, that deeply intoxicating and forbidden smell of her that he loves so much.

The sun rises, the sky lightens, and a new day begins … and Michael just curls in on himself even tighter until he almost believes that soon he'll stop breathing altogether and this pain can finally end.

* * *

On the third day, his brother leaves a voicemail on his phone. Michael wasn't there to pick it up when it rang; he'd been kneeling in the bushes, putrid vomit spewing from his mouth, after just the latest round of nightmares. Lincoln is calling, as he says, _to make sure his little brother is still alive and hasn't killed himself yet on this damn Kamikaze mission of his, and to stop being such an ass and call him back_.

Michael doesn't though. Call him, that is.

He cannot bring himself to, not now. Not when his life is spinning uncontrollably on its axis and Lincoln's has finally steadied in place, ready for a new beginning. He wonders when their positions became so reversed, when it was _his_ life that was suddenly way out of balance and Lincoln's that made perfect, staggering sense.

And he doesn't begrudge Lincoln this freedom, he tells himself. _Really, he doesn't.

* * *

_

It is on the fifth day that she comes to him.

He is again curled up into the smallest coil he can make; not in a car this time, but on a bed, in an old flea-infested motel where the rooms are fifty dollars a night and fifteen for an hour. He's tossing and flipping in his sleep, but of course he is unaware of this, and he thinks – even though he _knows_ he shouldn't – that it's real, that she's actually, truly, amazingly _here_.

She's standing on the boat tied up at the dock, wearing that same white shirt which does nothing to show off her delicate figure. She's squinting up at them, her hand shielding her warm, chocolaty eyes from the unforgiving Panamanian sun. She smiles, he whispers her name, and all at once he feels like he has the power to turn this back, to revisit those days in the infirmary where it was just him and her, and life was a whole lot simpler than it is now.

He awakes with that deep longing you feel after closing a favourite book, realizing that that was as good as it'd get, and now it was over and you hadn't had enough, and there would never be any more.

But he still sees her and he believes, besides the nagging in his head that says he doesn't deserve this degree of good fortune, that he can rewrite the ending of this book and give the Romeo and his Juliet a more fitful ending.

* * *

"It's not your fault, you know," whispers the woman beside him.

They're driving along a long, dusty road that opens out onto the sapphire ocean on one side, and a flat wasteland on the other. Her red hair blows out the rolled down window and she tries to hold it back out of her eyes, but then she'll let go and it will fly again; he smiles and refrains from telling her that he likes it better that way.

"What's that?" he asks; he's so full of mindless bliss at this moment, just by being beside her, that he misses the seriousness in her tone.

"My … death. There was nothing you could have done."

His smile slips and he grasps vainly onto that fleeting happiness. She has the power to hold him up, he realizes, but also the lone authority to tear him back down to the most bottomless, blackest of pits.

And, oh _God_, but it still hurts too much. "Don't say that."

Her eyes focus on the horizon far away. "It's the Company's fault. They did all this. They started it."

"If I hadn't – " he begins.

She sighs. "You can't keep thinking in 'what ifs', Michael. Life is what it is, and we can't change it. Don't allow yourself to travel down this road and only wonder how things might be different."

He tries to lighten the mood, bring back the easy banter he's just become re-accustomed to. She's only been with him again for one week, but it feels like a second, and he's not ready to move on. "And what might that be, Tancredi?"

She doesn't allow it. She says, "You want revenge in my name. You think it'll make you feel better. You hope that if you lash out at the world, it'll owe you some penance for everything that's gone wrong."

"Still a believer in cynicism, I see."

Her glare melts him and solidifies him at the same time. She is his weakness, but also his strength, and he is afraid, absolutely _terrified_, of living without her.

* * *

On the second week, when he comes to the horrible conclusion that this dream can't last forever, he seriously considers just ending it.

He's standing before this night's motel's bathroom mirror, the gun heavy in his hand, staring at his reflection. To him, his eyes look dead. His face is void of animation, of anything that resembles humanity; he fails at stopping to imagine if her face looks like this now, too, somewhere resting in the ground.

But then she's slipping up behind him. She places her hand on the gun – neither forcing, nor restraining – waiting for his decision. He feels like he should ask her opinion, but he already knows her answer, and that's almost enough.

When she speaks, her voice wavers and fades in a fantasy wind. "Please," she says.

That lone word is saturated in so much love, and longing, and desperation, that he falls to his knees at her feet.

She wants him to live for her, and he decides that he will; he can't refuse her, not now that he finally has her back.

* * *

The third week, they finally reach the U.S. border, and they sneak through, none the wiser, into the unfamiliar terrain of their homeland. It's raining when they switch cars, picking up the dark green sedan from a lonesome park off the highway. He doesn't feel like talking and they drive in comfortable silence for a while until his half-forgotten cell phone rings from its spot in the cup holder.

"Can you get …?" he starts to ask. But one look tells him that she either can't or won't. She doesn't touch many things (the gun was an exception) and he likes to think that it's a good thing: he has no desire to see if her hand will float right through, or if it's solid on the object. Either way makes him look insane.

He shakes his head and picks it up himself before shutting it off and putting it down again after one glance at the display.

She looks confused. "Who was it?"

"Linc."

She's even more mystified than before. "You don't want to talk to him?"

"He'll only ask questions that I can't give him answers to."

"Oh." She leaves it at that.

* * *

She starts to disappear as they reach L.A.

It's the fourth week since she was dead and the third since he slept through the night without any vision of her.

She goes in gradually increasing intervals of time – at first it was mere minutes, and then it was hours, and now it's been the longest yet at two days. He wants to know where she goes, if she is somehow floating between the worlds of reality and the divine. He wants to know how much longer he'll have with her until she's gone for good.

He puts her picture on the wall, trying to keep her with him. She's not there when he finds Gretchen and Whistler, or when Mahone requests a face-to-face. And after three days of not seeing her, he knows it's for good; he knows it in the way he knows the exact ivory shade of her skin or the cinnamon scent of her hair. He just knows.

He still doesn't know if he wants to live, or kill, or self-destruct until he's the master of all wrecks. He cannot call Lincoln, in fear that his brother will hear that dangerous cadence masquerading his voice. So he points a gun in her killers' faces, and they tell him she's alive. But he already knew that, didn't he? She is alive _in_ _him_, and although she's gone now, she's still always there in his heart.

He goes to see Alex with no prior expectations, telling himself that he had that dream of her and him one last time and he can't ever get it back. He calls Linc and Bruce, only half-daring to hope. He's still broken and he doesn't want to survive through more disappointment.

* * *

When he spots her in front of the window of the safe house Bruce has taken them to, she's surrounded in an ethereal halo of sunshine and brightness and wonder. He's thinks she's his vision come back to haunt him.

They reach each other at the same time and his hands move of their own accord all over her: her face, her lips, her eyelids, her ears. He kisses her. He cannot get enough of her, and she cannot get enough of him. In his peripheral sight he notices vaguely the other men leaving the room, and then she is pulling on his arm and they're entering her bedroom, and he knows he is in heaven and that he doesn't deserve it, but he'll take what he can get because she's _alive_.

_the end._


End file.
